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Search at the speed of type has implications for marketers

Search now faster than the speed of type… ok, like about time, really. Though I wonder what impact this will have on search marketing?

If the idea is to accelerate your experience off the search page, will this place an even greater premium on the top 2-3 search results. Give the results appear in real-time, will it reduce the time you linger on the page and consider other results?

What do you think?

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High Performance

Tony’s blog is well worth following and if you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. I like how he focuses on labor day on how we can get more productive. These hit home in particular:

  1. Make sufficient sleep a top priority. Schedule your bedtime, and start winding down at least 45 minutes earlier. Ninety-eight percent of all human beings need at least 7-8 hours a night to feel fully rested. Only a fraction of us get that much regularly, in part because we buy into the myth that sacrificing an hour or two of sleep a night give us an hour more of productivity.
  2. Schedule specific times for activities in your life that you deem important but not urgent. With so much coming at you all the time, it’s easy to focus all day on whatever feels most pressing in the moment.
  3. Live like a sprinter, not a marathoner. When you work continuously, you’re actually progressively depleting your energy reservoir as the day wears on. By making intermittent renewal and refuelingimportant, you’re regularly replenishing your reservoir, so you’re not only able to fully engage at intervals along the way, but also to maintain high energy much further into the day. (I think lots of people uknowingly do this… reading blogs, sites, feeds, twittering… we seek retreat in the river of digital content around us)
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The New Challenge to IT

Looking forward to reading Empowered. Everywhere I go I see more and more employees acquiring their own IT and going it alone. They are simply disillusioned with the time/cost/ equation offered by traditional IT. This was pretty enlightening:

The same is true in the way employees are harnessing consumer technologies — social, mobile, video, and cloud. They’re improving how they do their jobs and solving your customer and business problems. And it’s not just a few employees; it’s a critical mass of employees. In a survey of more than 4,000 U.S. information workers, we found that 37% are using do-it-yourself technologies without IT’s permission. LinkedIn, Google Docs, Smartsheet.com, Facebook, iPads, YouTube, Dropbox, Flipboard — the list is long and growing. Many of these scenarios are do-it-yourself projects. For example, want to ask me business questions on Facebook? Piece of cake, I’ll just friend you. Personal iPhones for email, apps, and Internet access outside my clients’ door? Check. Google Sites and Docs to exchange documents with partners? Sure, I can spin up a free site or IT can spend the $50/user/year and make it secure. YouTube to post fix-it-yourself videos for tough service problems? My kid’s good with a Flip camera. She can film me doing the fix myself.

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Kevin’s good ideas for dealing with email overload

I like Kevin’s ideas. While this one is a bit over the top it seemed pretty practical.

Step 1: Create a filter that auto-responds to all unopened emails > 14 days old w/the following message:

Your email (below) is now 14 days old and has not been opened.  To minimize email buildup your email has now been placed in the archive.  Should you still require a response simply respond back and you’ll automatically be added to the priority queue.  Thank you.

Step 2: Setup another filter that looks for the text "Your email (below)", this will catch the email responses back to you from those still requiring your response.  Filter these into a special folder you check and respond to daily.

My other big one is to create a CC folder and a rule that places all email you are copied on in it.

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Bob Dwyer has gone mad…

This guy was one of the Rugby greats. He’s now got a serious case of All Black paranoia and is generating conspiracy theories at an alarming rate. The latest – that the All Blacks are getting the benefit of referees decision — is ridiculous.

First, he seems to forget that there is often not a direct correlation between penalties and yellow cards. A yellow card for violence, for instance, is an offense not predicted by penalties.

Second, the data is skewed by not associating penalties with repeated warnings – one of the Australian’s yellow cards was for repeated warnings. If NZ had offended next it would have been theirs.

Third, if you want to play the data game, throw in post game suspensions and correlate that to yellow cards – what you discover is that both Sth Africa and Australia were the most egregious offenders in the game and the cards were warranted.

In short, the conclusion presented is woefully short on analysis, let along statistical relevance, and coupled with a fair degree of paranoia and sensationalism.

It ignores one simple fact. Both teams were beaten by the better side.